“Come Up Here and Demonstrate” — Director Didn’t Know the Man in the Back Was JIMMY PAGE

“Come Up Here and Demonstrate” — Director Didn’t Know the Man in the Back Was JIMMY PAGE

Come up here and demonstrate. Director didn’t know the man in the back was Jimmy Page. The Royal Academy of Music on Marylebone Road in October of 1997 had the specific atmosphere of an institution that had been doing serious work in the same building for long enough that the seriousness had entered the walls and the corridors and the quality of silence between the sounds that the building contained.

 It was one of the older music conservatories in Britain, established in the 19th century, and it carried that establishment in the way that old institutions carry it. Not as decoration, but as expectation. The expectation of rigor and the expectation of taking music seriously in the way that serious things deserve to be taken seriously.

Dr. Richard Holloway had been teaching at the Royal Academy for 25 years. He was 58 years old and he had spent those 25 years in the concentrated study and teaching of music theory, harmony, and counterpoint, the foundational disciplines of formal music education that he considered not merely useful but essential.

 The disciplines without which a musician could not fully understand what they were doing or fully control what they were producing. He had strong views about this. He had developed them across 25 years of watching students arrive with varying degrees of formal preparation and watching what the presence or absence of that preparation produced in their work.

 The views were not dogmatic. They were empirical, or so he believed, arrived at through consistent observation rather than theoretical commitment. He had seen what formal training produced and he had seen what its absence produced and he had, over 25 years, formed a clear picture of the relationship. He had also, over those 25 years, developed strong views about rock music that were related to these views in a specific way.

 The relationship was not one of dismissal. Holloway had listened to rock music with genuine attention, applying to it the analytical tools that he applied to everything. And what he had found was music that succeeded at the levels of rhythm and texture and emotional immediacy and that was limited at the level of harmonic sophistication in the ways that music was limited when it developed outside the tradition of formal harmonic thinking.

 He said this in his seminars because he considered it an accurate observation and because accurate observations were what seminars were for. These views were not dismissive in the way that some academics in his position dismissed popular music, which was the dismissal of someone who had decided not to engage. Holloway had engaged.

 He had listened to the significant works of the rock canon and he had applied to them the analytical tools that he applied to everything else. And what he had found consistently was music that was effective at the level of rhythm and texture and emotional impact and that was at the level of harmonic sophistication limited in the ways that music was limited when the people who made it had not developed the theoretical framework that harmonic sophistication required.

 He considered this an observation rather than a judgment. The music did what it did. It simply did not do the things that formal harmonic training made possible. He said this regularly in his seminars because it was, in his understanding, true. Jimmy Page was in London on the morning of October the 14th because London was where he was sometimes in October when there was not a specific reason to be elsewhere and he had no specific reason to be elsewhere.

 He had been spending time in this period of his life doing the things that a musician who is not currently touring or recording spends time doing, which included listening to music, thinking about music, and occasionally visiting the people who thought seriously about music. The period after Led Zeppelin had been a period of reconstruction and also a period of genuine interest in music that was not production-oriented.

Music encountered as a listener and a thinker rather than as someone with something to deliver. He had found in this period that he had more capacity for this kind of engagement than the years of active production had allowed, and that the engagement was productive in the way that all genuine attention to things you love is productive, even when the product is invisible.

John Renbourn was one of the people he visited. Renbourn was a guitarist whose work with Pentangle in the late 1960s and early 1970s had developed a kind of acoustic guitar playing that drew on folk, jazz, and classical traditions in ways that Jimmy had always found genuinely interesting. Not as a influence, but as a parallel investigation into what the guitar could do when you approached it without the assumptions of any single tradition.

They had known each other for 30 years in the overlapping way that musicians who work in different but adjacent territories come to know each other. The crossing paths of sessions and studios and the late evenings in the kind of rooms where musicians ended up talking to each other past midnight about the music they loved.

Renbourn had mentioned in a recent conversation that he was sitting in on an advanced harmony seminar at the Royal Academy that Thursday, and that Jimmy was welcome to come along if he was in the area and had an afternoon free. He had said this casually as an open invitation rather than a specific arrangement, and Jimmy had received it in the same spirit, and had decided on the morning of the 14th that he was in the area and had an afternoon free.

He arrived at the Royal Academy at 2:15, having been told by Renborn that the seminar began at 2:30, and that he should ask for room 12 on the second floor. The receptionist, a young woman managing several tasks simultaneously, in the way that people manage the front desk of busy institutions, asked whether he was a student or a visitor.

 He said he was a visitor, a friend of one of the attendees. She directed him to the second floor without registering anything particular about the transaction, which was the appropriate response to a middle-aged man in plain clothes arriving for a seminar. Room 12 on the second floor contained 20 postgraduate students with notebooks and score paper, and the prepared attentiveness of people who have come to a seminar knowing the subject in advance and expecting to go deeper into it.

 The students were in the later stages of advanced degrees, people for whom the technical vocabulary of harmony and counterpoint was operational rather than aspirational, who could read a Brahms reduction and discuss the voice leading from memory. They were, in the normal course of things, the most technically prepared audience Jimmy would encounter in any room he walked into uninvited.

It did not contain John Renborn, who had woken up that morning with a fever that had arrived overnight with the completeness of fevers that mean business, and who had called the Academy to arrange a substitute, and had not called Jimmy because Jimmy had not left a number, and because Renborn was managing a fever and its implications, and had not, in the management of it, thought to find another way to reach the person he had casually invited the week before.

The seminar was covered by Dr. Holloway himself, who occasionally covered sessions when the scheduled instructor could not attend. He was setting up when Jimmy arrived, arranging score pages on the stand, and writing three chord diagrams on the whiteboard in different colors. He registered the arrival of a man in his 50s in plain clothes with gray hair and a notebook under his arm with the brief attention of someone who has things to arrange and returns immediately to the arranging.

Jimmy found the chair at the back of the room and sat in it. Holloway began the seminar. The seminar was focused on harmonic progression in the romantic period using Brahms as the primary text. Holloway was a capable instructor in the specific way that people are capable when they have taught the same material for 25 years and have developed a relationship with it that is both intimate and analytical.

The relationship of someone who knows the subject fully and who can move through it with the confidence of familiarity. He moved through the Brahms with the ease of long practice, showing the students how the harmonic choices worked, how the voice leading created tension and resolved it, how the relationship between the baseline and the upper voices produced the specific quality of inevitability that Brahms at his best produced.

Jimmy listened with the notebook open on the desk in front of him, writing in it. Not words primarily, staff notation, the shorthand of someone who thinks in musical terms before verbal ones. He was tracking the analysis, not as a student following a lesson, but as a musician engaging with material that intersected with his own thinking.

Approximately 20 minutes into the seminar, Dr. Holloway arrived at the part of the session that he always arrived at when harmonic sophistication was the subject, which was the comparison between the complexity of formal compositional practice and the limitations of music that had developed outside that practice.

“The sophistication we are examining in Brahms,” Holloway said, “is not available to composers who work outside the tradition of formal harmonic training. This is not a comment on talent or on commercial success. It is an observation about what formal training makes possible and what its absence forecloses.

” A student in the third row raised her hand. “Does this apply to all popular music?” “To varying degrees. Some popular music is more harmonically developed than other popular music, but the ceiling exists. Music that has developed outside the formal tradition reaches a point beyond which it cannot progress because the tools required to progress are the tools that formal training provides.

” A second student, one who had a notebook on his desk with handwritten analyses of various pieces including, on one visible page, what appeared to be a harmonic reduction of a Led Zeppelin recording, raised his hand. “What about Led Zeppelin? Kashmir, specifically?” Holloway considered this briefly. “Led Zeppelin is a useful example.

 Kashmir in particular is a piece that creates an impression of harmonic depth through texture and production. The actual harmonic structure is D modal, minimal movement. The impression exceeds the substance.” From the back of the room, quietly, “I don’t think that’s quite right.” Holloway turned and looked at the man who had spoken, a visitor, he had thought on arrival, a friend of one of the attendees, a man in his 50s in plain clothes with gray hair and a notebook that appeared to be full of musical notation.

“Do you have a background in music theory?” Holloway asked. “Not a formal one.” “And in guitar technique, formal study?” “None.” Holloway nodded with the controlled patience of an educator managing an interruption. “The observation you’re disagreeing with is one I’ve arrived at through 25 years of teaching and analysis.

 Without a formal framework, it’s difficult to engage with it at the level the disagreement requires.” The man in the back row looked at him for a moment. “Kashmir, you said D modal, minimal movement, but did you analyze the bass and guitar voicing separately or from the chord chart?” “From the standard analysis of the recording.” “The chord chart says D modal, but the bass is moving independently of the guitar. They’re in counterpoint.

 The tension between them is where the harmonic engine of the piece lives. It doesn’t appear in the chord chart.” Holloway looked at the man with the expression of someone revising an initial assessment. “That’s a specific claim.” “Yes.” “Can you demonstrate it?” A pause. Then, “Is there a piano?” There was a piano, an upright in the corner that was used for ear training exercises by students who needed keyboard access between lessons.

Jimmy Page crossed the room to it, sat on the bench with the specific ease of someone who has been sitting at pianos for a long time, and placed his hands on the keys. Dr. Richard Holloway stood at the side of the room. 20 postgraduate students of music at the Royal Academy of Music picked up their pens. Jimmy played the opening of Kashmir, not the record, not the full arrangement, the harmonic skeleton of it, the relationship between what the bass was doing and what the guitar was doing laid out on the piano in the way

that a harmonic analysis lays things out showing the structure beneath the texture. He played it and then he said without stopping the bass descends while the guitar sustains the suspension. They never quite resolve simultaneously. The tension between them is the harmonic engine.

 It’s not D modal with minimal movement. It’s two independent voices creating tension through sustained ambiguity. He played it again this time isolating the bassline. The bass descending figure against the static guitar. He played the guitar part alone. The guitar holding the suspension. He played both together. The counterpoint.

 The implied harmonies that appear between them. None of this is in the chord chart. Holloway had moved to the whiteboard. He was writing not because the seminar required it but because he was working something out. That’s modal counterpoint a student said from the third row. The student who had asked about Led Zeppelin. Yes, Jimmy said.

But the piece isn’t notated that way. The piece isn’t notated at all. It was worked out by ear from what sounded right and then recorded. The notation came after and it simplified what was actually there because notation optimized for simplicity when what was there was complex. Holloway turned from the whiteboard.

 You said you had no formal training in music theory. I don’t. Then how did you I listened to records Jimmy said 40 years of records blues musicians jazz musicians classical musicians. I listened to what they were doing and I tried to understand it well enough to do it myself. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I found something in the attempt that was different from what I was trying to do, but worth keeping.

A student in the front row had a notebook with a recognizable logo on the cover. He had been looking at the man at the piano since the bassline demonstration. He was now looking at the logo on his notebook and back at the man, and arriving in the specific way that recognitions arrive when they are running on insufficient information that has just been supplied at a conclusion.

“Are you Jimmy Page?” the student said. The room understood this before Holloway did. 20 students revised their understanding of the previous 40 minutes in real time, revised it completely from the beginning, and the revision produced a particular quality of silence that was different from all the silences that had preceded it.

Holloway looked at the man at the piano. “Mr. Page,” he said. It was not a greeting. It was the arrival of a recognition. “Kashmir is one of mine,” Jimmy said. “I wrote it, so I know what was in it when I wrote it. Whether the conventional analysis captures what was in it is a different question.” Holloway sat in the instructor’s chair at the front of the room.

 For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked at his students and said, “Mr. Page, if you’re willing, would you continue?” Jimmy continued. What followed was an hour in which Jimmy Page sat at the piano in an advanced harmony seminar at the Royal Academy of Music and talked about how he had arrived at the music he had made.

 The specific process of listening and attempting and failing and finding something in the failure and building on what was found. He talked about the American blues musicians he had listened to obsessively in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The specific things he had heard in those recordings that he had spent years trying to understand well enough to reproduce.

He talked about the way he had arrived at the Stairway to Heaven acoustic introduction, the chromatic bass descent against the sustained melody, the implied harmonies that the combination produced, the seven distinct harmonic colors that emerged from four chord symbols. He played it on the piano showing the structure.

“Bach does this.” A student said. “Yes.” Jimmy said. “I wasn’t thinking about Bach when I wrote it. I was following what sounded right. But the principle is the same because the principle is a property of music rather than of any particular tradition.” Holloway, sitting in his chair, had his notebook open. He was writing.

A student asked, “Would formal training have changed what you did?” Jimmy considered this with the patience of someone for whom the question was genuinely interesting rather than rhetorical. “It might have made some of it more precise.” He said. “Whether more precise is better depends on what you’re trying to do.

 The Stairway baseline came from following an approach that a formalist wouldn’t have followed because a formalist would have known it was unconventional and might have stopped before finding where it led. The unconventional approach produced something. Stopping would have prevented it.” He played the baseline alone. “This is what unconventional produces sometimes.

You can’t know in advance which unconventional approaches lead somewhere. You find out by following them.” Holloway said from his chair, “You said the ceiling I described isn’t universal. It’s a tendency. For some people who work without formal training, the ceiling is real. For others, the self-teaching produces something that formal training would have prevented.

How do you know which you are? “I don’t,” Jimmy said. “You know afterward, from what you made, not before.” At the end of the session, when the students had begun gathering their materials, Holloway crossed the room and stood beside the piano. “I owe you a correction,” he said. “Categorically is wrong.

 I should have said, in my experience, most of the time, not always, not every.” “Yes,” Jimmy said. “You’ve come here and found my analysis of your own work insufficient.” “You didn’t have all the information. The chord chart doesn’t give you all the information.” Holloway was quiet for a moment. “I listened to Led Zeppelin in 1971.

A colleague played it for me. I said, ‘It’s effective, but harmonically thin.'” “I’ve said versions of that for 26 years.” “And?” “And I was wrong. Not about effective, about thin.” Jimmy stood from the piano bench. “I learned something today from your Brahms analysis, the voice leading in the third movement.

 I hadn’t approached it from that angle before.” Holloway looked at him. “You’re saying you came here to learn?” “I came to see a friend who wasn’t here. I stayed because the subject was interesting.” He paused. “It was interesting.” In the weeks that followed the October seminar, Dr. Richard Holloway revised the section of his advanced harmony curriculum that addressed the relationship between formal training and musical understanding.

 He did not remove the section. He revised it. The word categorically disappeared from his lectures. The phrase in my experience appeared where it had not appeared before. A case study of Kashmir was added to the supplementary materials. An analysis that showed the harmonic relationship between the bass and guitar voicings, the implied harmonies that the counterpoint produced, the things that the standard chord chart did not show.

The case study was attributed to an anonymous guest presenter. Holloway also added a statement to his opening lecture that he had not included before. He told his students that formal training produced certain capacities that self-teaching did not produce. He also told them that self-teaching occasionally produced capacities that formal training did not produce, and that the curriculum they were completing would give them the formal capacities without guaranteeing the other kind, and that both kinds were real and both were

worth understanding. The student who had recognized Jimmy Page has spoken about that afternoon in subsequent years without using Jimmy’s name, describing it as the session in which a guest analyzed a famous piece of rock music on the piano and showed the class things about the piece that the standard analysis had missed.

The student keeps the notes from that afternoon. The notes are in two handwritings, their own and the handwriting of whoever was writing on the board at the front of the room during the harmonic analysis, a handwriting that is unfamiliar to anyone who might come across the notebook. Jimmy Page has not mentioned the afternoon at the Royal Academy of Music in any interview or public context.

He visited a friend who wasn’t there, sat in on a seminar that interested him, disagreed with something he heard, was asked to demonstrate the disagreement, and demonstrated it. Then he left. From his perspective, this was an afternoon in London that produced an unexpected conversation about music, which was the kind of afternoon he found worth having.

From Richard Holloway’s perspective, it was the afternoon that removed the word categorically from his vocabulary and the word always and the confidence that a ceiling he had observed consistently in his experience was a ceiling that applied without exception to everyone. The ceiling Philip Marsh described was real for some self-taught guitarists.

 It was not universal. The room had contained a proof of that. A proof in D modal counterpoint written on the board in two colors, played on an upright piano in the corner by the man who had written Kashmir in the first place and who knew because he had been there when it was written what had actually been in it.

Notation is a tool. The music exists before it. That is not a claim that formal training cannot accommodate. It is a claim that formal training sometimes forgets and that a man sitting in the back row of an advanced harmony seminar occasionally needs to remind it of. The ceiling Holloway had described was real for some musicians who had worked without formal training.

 He had seen it many times and his observation was accurate within its proper scope. What the October afternoon had shown him was that the scope required more careful definition than he had given it. That a tendency observed consistently enough to feel like a rule was still a tendency and not a rule and that the difference between those two things was significant enough to require the revision of how he spoke about it.

He made the revision. He continued teaching. His students continued learning. The curriculum now contained, alongside everything it had always contained, a case study in what music can do when the person making it has followed the sound past the point where formal training might have told them to stop. Some afternoons in London produce unexpected conversations about music.

This was one of them. The unexpected conversations are sometimes the ones worth having.